Komer Blog: Blizzard Lose Game One

On Saturday I had to wake up at the ungodly hour of 9:30am– which I guess is pushing it a bit for a 1pm game on the reserve. However, for a guy that goes to sleep at 4am every night and wakes up at 11am every morning, every Barrie Blizzard game this CLax being an afternoon one is just musician-crippling. I guess whoever scheduled our games never considered that I don’t live the life of a grown-up. And here I thought the whole world revolved around me.

So I woke up at this insane hour, usually only reserved for morning joggers and monks, drank my weight in water, threw on a suit and an extremely feminine pink tie, and loaded my disgustingly large equipment bag and my Buddhist buddy into my car.

Speaking of monks… and this is true… a friend that I met in college, who afterwards went insane and moved into a Buddhist monastery and eventually became a monk, has been living on my couch for the past few months while he’s between his monastery in Niagara Falls and one he’s moving to in California. He’s been forced to watch 3 lacrosse games in the past 3 days. He likes it, but actually makes a pained, involuntary noise whenever he sees a hard, one-handed slash on a running ball-carrier. Its like a concerned mom-noise. It’s pretty funny. Anyway he joined me for the drive from downtown Toronto to the reserve.

We got to the ILA, which is a great arena… though I’m always strangely cold when I’m there. Our dressing room had a door leading directly to the outside, which probably doesn’t help. Also my body was still in shock from being up doing stuff before noon. We got out warmup shirts and shorts (it was our first game of the season), which are a questionable purple, but our jerseys are pretty wicked.

I didn’t take any shots in the first warmup, as I only have my lower gear on at that point and am a giant prima donna. But Tim Prothero, the photo guy, came out at some point and said he needed head-shots of all the players with their gear on. So I ran back into the room to get my uppers, and had a moment of sheer panic when I realized that THERE AREN’T ANY MIRRORS IN THE ILA DRESSING ROOMS! Photos! And no idea what my hair was doing. Awesome. I took quick photos with my cell so I could see what was up, but it wasn’t much help. Thankfully I was alone in the room when doing so. Defeated I went out, found Tim, and had documented, for any and all CLax programs and website, just how stupid my hair can look when forced awake so shortly after the sun rises.

I had my Gatorade Prime, went out for the for-realz warmup, came in, listened to a pep-talk, and went out for the game.

The game was glorious. Ohsweken has scary shooters. They’re good. Their power play is good, and in case nobody knows, CLax is absolutely rife with penalties. I had either 64 shots against or 61 depending on if you believe the arena announcer or the Pointstreak on the Googleweb machine. We apparently fired even more shots, and Jeff Powless played well in the shark-tank at the other end.

I mostly blacked out and can’t remember much of the game except there was a fluorescent green sticky price tag lying in the newly-carpeted crease in my home end. I was excited to come back to it for the 4th quarter. I feel like it brought me luck, until in a moment of insanity, I scooped it out of the way and into my net. Shortly after that I was out-thought by Delby Powless and he scored the winning goal against me short-side.

I still blame the loss on Caleb Wiles for only scoring like 10 goals or whatever. If he had buried 14 we would have won.

So to sum up: I was caught off-guard for photos, and Wiles lost the game for us.